What is and Might Have Been
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
One of the ways in which the Holocaust makes itself poignantly felt is through the illumination of what it took from us. The letters, diaries, and photographs of the victims
shape numbers into names, names into faces, and faces into lives. This is especially true when the documents left behind are artworks.
When an art exhibition centers on the life and work of a Holocaust victim, as does the new show “Innovator, Activist, Healer: The Art of Friedl Dicker-Brandeis” at the Jewish Museum, it is difficult to know where, exactly, our subjectivity begins and ends. The circumstances surrounding the artist can become paramount to the artworks themselves, coloring our experience. This is further complicated when the artist, who meant so much to those who knew her and survived, left a legacy as large if not larger than the actual oeuvre.
I first became aware of the legacy of Friedl Dicker-Brandeis (1898-1944) years ago through the beautifully sobering book “I never saw another butterfly: Children’s Drawings and Poems from Theresienstadt Concentration Camp 1942-1944” (1964).
Around 15,000 children under the age of 15 passed through Terezin (a “model,” or “show,” concentration camp 60 kilometers from Prague) on their way to the gas chambers. And only about 100 survived. Dicker-Brandeis taught art to over 100 of those children, and her work contributed to the foundation of art therapy, especially through the groundbreaking Edith Kramer, who was one of her students. The illustrations in “I never saw another butterfly” were chosen from approximately 5,000 drawings, created under Dicker-Brandeis’s tutelage, which the artist packed into suitcases before her deportation to Auschwitz-Birkenau.
This exhibition’s 150-plus items feature Dicker-Brandeis’s photographs and letters, her paintings, drawings, textiles, and furniture, her architectural drawings, posters, stage, and costume designs. There is also a special section in the last gallery devoted to her student’s artwork from Terezin. While walking among the children’s drawings – and through the whole exhibition – I found that it was difficult to separate feelings about the artist’s work from feelings about her life and influence as a mentor and teacher. Yet, if the artworks are to be evaluated objectively, circumstance, no matter how horrific and unimaginable, must be put aside.
Dicker-Brandeis was born in Vienna and studied at the Weimar Bauhaus under Klee, Kandinsky, and Oscar Schlemmer, whose influence can be seen not only in her own work but also in the teaching exercises in the children’s drawings. The show begins with her student work from the Bauhaus, including a beautifully lyrical “Proof of Page for Utopia” (1922), in which heavy German Fraktur type is made light, lyrical, and airy; and in gorgeous program covers for “the First Bauhaus Evening” and “Helge Lindberg’s Performance” (both 1920).Also on view is the wonderfully weird, fairy tale-esque lithograph “Witchcraft Scene” (c. 1920), whose inventive and fantastical, talismanic images of animals merging with a crescent moon, stars, and symbols, reveals an artist with a personal mythology (inspired, perhaps, by Klee).
The life drawings and portraits from this period – indeed, from her entire oeuvre – come from a different place within the artist. They are accomplished but normative and
over determined. Lacking in personality, the images never seem to get beyond the mere surface-level description of their subjects, as if the artist were afraid to venture inward and beyond the illustrative. Her representational works, which feel as if they were made by an artist seduced by her own hand, resort to fanciful effects of smudging and the bravado of various line weights that dance around and caress the page rather than create form.
Dicker-Brandeis, who really shone as a designer, lost a sense of the whole when it came to making paintings and drawings from life; her romanticized figures often separate from their hazy surroundings. I sensed that the artist was never quite comfortable with charcoal and paint, that she felt more at home with autonomous things she could hold and manipulate: typography, embroidery, and sewing, in which the field is held together through the textures and weights of letters or of fabric.
In 1923, Dicker-Brandeis moved to Berlin and opened a design studio with Franz Singer. There and, later, in Vienna, they produced some wonderful stage and costume designs, some of which feel influenced by the designs of Sonia Delaunay, as well as furniture, textiles, and toys. After the rise of the Nazis, she became active in the Communist Party and produced photomontage posters, a few of which are in the show, in the style of Hannah Hoch that, with their reliance on images of suffering children, are heavy-handed.
Dicker-Brandeis was arrested in 1934. After she was released, she moved to Prague, married, and, in 1942, was sent with her husband to Terezin.
This exhibition, which attempts to present the artist fully, may have taken on too much. (Its title suggests as much.) Certainly, the show offers more than is possible to digest in a single viewing. Dicker-Brandeis’s strengths, as evident at the Jewish Museum, were as a designer more than a portraitist; an inspirational teacher, fabulist, and teller of fairy tales more than a painter of flowers or street scenes. Robbed of her voice at 46, we can only wonder at what stories she may have lived to tell.